« prolegomena
Bianco Luno
Notebook VIII
4/14/92 – 9/8/93
Part 3
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"We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. [Because] to abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice." Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror.9
~ The end of history—when ‘you’ and ‘I’ conflate to ‘we’, according to Marx—seems barely conceivable to me.In Marx, as a descriptive thinker, I see no threat. As when dead, it cannot matter to me then, at that time, as it so much unnerves me, still existing, now. When the hardness of my separateness dissolves, so will my fear. But as a normative theory it is a very hard sell; it may, I suspect, in fact, be the right thing to advance, but only according to a conception of rationality no individual (and who else could be the target of the promotion?) can think. Like my plan for depopulating the planet, it will have to be seen as a joke, however intended. ~ Every time the boy brought home something he thought precious, found in a ditch, he was met with derision, and the lattice of feelings, on which he’d trained to grow enough hope as to seem inhuman, crumbled.What he selects now from the gutter is decomposed or barbed or smelly, and ready—the boy is now always, like a scout, ready. ~ It must be, you feel, the boy might have reacted differently, or can now.~ The mother and child on a spit.Putting aside the twisted smile of the situation—is it that in describing it we are so liable to distortion, or that the image renders impossible spontaneous reaction?—in the face of this, what would you take for an acceptable response? A witness to atrocity could not better instruct me, an innocent to such scenes. Anything effected with the mouth would seem insincere. The question is complicated because I would not be satisfied with either the first expression of the face or any cry filtered through the language. The mouth might reflect the pain of the victim and at once, with the same muscles, the vicarious thrill of the absent sculptor in flesh. The eyes, aware, would have to be clear and helpless. ~ Stupidity n., term of art: the subconscious suppression of an unprepossessing truth for comfort. Suppression for survival should tend to be more conscious—for survival, i.e., to avoid suicide, insanity or worse—and perhaps excusable through being tragic.~ I am obsessed with this mother and child on a spit theme; the idea is so apt, looking in the eyes of the people on the street.News: only fifty people a day are dying now in Baidoa (Somalia) and most of them not of starvation but of disease. ~ Panhandler: "Not all that bad, Christmas, for business. Folks get sappy and reach in their pockets. Worst time is summer. Everybody thinks you’re having too much fun and they walk on."~ Incompatibility of consciousness and sincerity.~ Two women in conversation in a café.I can only see the face of one and barely hear anything. Her expression alternates between amazement and nodding acknowledgment or approval. Do I ever have conversations where I can make use of such faces? Or am I just unaware of my substitutes for them? ~ Why can’t kindness to others also be a kindness to oneself?10~ There is no going back.If there ever was a golden time it is irretrievable. Without sounding too hopeful, we must come to embrace the darkness more and more. Yes, we lie ourselves to the grave but it appears to work. ~ Are my mannered questions lightly disguised, now antique, aphorisms?Is an awareness of the impossibility of things a feigned ignorance? Are we shirking the responsibility of sincerity? Don’t I really know enough to be sincere? ~ Cold morning sun, like faith.Like Bach. I have not lost everything. I can still remember the rapture of what it was like to believe. ~ The acidity of mind.~ Bemoaning the loss of faith may be human but it is not the right thing to do.The latter will always be just out of reach. ~ The music in church was the only thing that never seemed phony to me.I still find pleasure in remembering when it still didn’t. ~ The violence St. Augustine adjures Petrarch (in Petrarch’s Secretum11 ) to do his refined devotion to Laura—the lovingly carved dado on which he has rested his life’s ornate meaning—is quite terrible.The same corrosive truth that corrupts her flesh and even the image he has of her in his heart... can be turned against Augustine’s appeals to mortal reason and the pragmatics of faith. The exigencies of embodiment: that to hook Petrarch on a higher peg he should enlist reason at all. What remains proof against this acid is that, if you grant that we are truly drawn to the everlasting, then for certain there is something in all this soul-scrubbing for us. What a grand presumption—that we care about forever when our capacity for caring drops off so rapidly in time. We, for whom effective imperatives are hypothetical (that only if this) and whose eyes can only fog up, in supplication or disbelief, at the sight of a categorical from on high. Religion is insane. The alternative is paltry. ~ I care about this homeless mendicant, so I give my change.Certainly, I say to myself. ~ It is not even true that we care only for ourselves.~ Prudent—if we were that, we would never know regret.~ Self-love is an exaggeration.~ Cynic: one who has not let off trying in earnest even after it has become rather amusing is most deserving of the badge of the dog.~ Petrarch: "Such glory as belongs to man is enough for me."Contemporaneous with this flurry of soul-searching at the dawn of humanism in Europe, the natives of central Mexico were baring hearts: also not content with the middle colors of the spectrum. Violence to the person, the more extreme, the more it cleanses of vanity consciousness. But since there is no going back to the time when we could stand the sight of blood, the development of the newest forms of violence eschew the reds in favor of the cooler violets of the deepest bruises. It is not entirely true that we have any choice, contra Merleau-Ponty. ~ Fate is terrible until she has sapped all thought of glory from you.Petrarch’s modest portion is like a recipe for a balanced meal which all his poetry belies as sustaining. ~ Someday, to be sure, men will be violent after the manner of women today, who, it is hoped, will have progressed to as yet unimaginable forms.~ "You remain so dense. Out of the language of reason and truth you think you wring new inventions. The rules of thinking predate your integrity and will not brook your having enthroned it. The point of living escapes you."~ The woman, who calls herself the most intense and alive human being she knows, with whom I spend time when I spend it with anyone, said to me, "I’ve never been more alone in my life...", leaving me to finish the thought, "...than now with you."~ The point of living.~ The obvious notwithstanding, we can no longer stand the sight of blood.~ The meat we cannot stand to slaughter.~ You cannot bear that I turn into a question of taste what you deem a question of right. But no relativist, I think there are absolute standards of beauty in the universe, and though unattainable, they are somehow connected with moving through difficulty while embracing it...Or into deeper and deeper difficulty. And the worst difficulty I can imagine is the absence of hope—not merely its absence but that it never can exist; its every appearance a sham. And this is unconscionable to you. ~ I try to imagine a pure real hope, what form it would take, how I would recognize it, as I might, say, a liquid feeling in a line of Bach...The logical function of sorrow: welling in the eyes momentarily blurs the unforgivingly sharp outlines of truth. ~ How possible is it for a genuine Marxist to experience a local sadness or personal joy?Marxism is ethically unimpeachable; its trained manners (trained to proscribe indulgence), on the highest plane; the rest of us, profligate sentimentalists, worthy of the scaffold. But the urgency for violence is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the rest of us will quite voluntarily wither away when our eyes are fully opened—that is to say, when we learn to look through them. ~ This though: there is no Marxist aesthetic."...and its opposite is fundamentally immoral." ~ A moral rule of thumb: to do the least amount of evil, as it is easier to know, and good is never unalloyed.A calculus of pain can scarcely succeed where Bentham’s of pleasure fails, but this failure too, one can at least tone down by morally retiring in the face of consciousness. ~ "You make a clever joke of anything serious."~ The image of my upended dignity (which doesn’t consist of anything but a kind of algorithm) is so frightening to me that I think I will go to my grave shirking all the costumes of sentiment except perhaps one, a stately sadness.I forfeited the rest when I decided I would not cry as an infant, when the angel told me what was up. What faces were left to me? But the very face of distraction: a wandering eye, unsteered but by pretense and will.12 ~ The Devil’s refrain: I would gladly see the truth but for the person telling it.~ At the funeral of a girl who committed suicide, a man with a video camera, trained on the mother in mourning, captures on tape another man approach and fire a gun directly into the head of the woman and continue to fire on her body as she collapses to the ground.The frame reels, the man who controls it makes noises "like a wounded dog". The television news anchors are visibly uncomfortable showing the tape. The woman probably deserved to die, according to her ex-husband, who shot her: she was the cause of the daughter’s suicide. ~ So many of us deserve death—not because of anything in particular we might have done, but because we did nothing to deserve being born—and continue behaving as though this were not true.~ But it is not even death, quite, that we deserve.~ The real scandal was the camera man’s squeal and the news anchor’s squirm.The crime was committed against them; for the rest of us can repose in all of the little that we really are in private: the tape showed discernible pieces of flesh splashing from where the bullet entered... ~ Plumbless sadness at the eternal regularity of the surf, the ground bass ostinato, the plodding series of the naturalest numbers...But the otherwise is frightful too. That it was always going to happen this way; that something unprecedented (for the fated is, in essence, precedented) may happen, rationally unencumbered. ~ The boy in his cell took his excrement and smeared it across the wall.He tried to make something beautiful but could do nothing about the smell. ~ It is the only thing going for the truth—that you can call it that—as it is, in all respects and at all times, painful.What can function so well without this concession scarcely needs it. If no blossom were ever truly beautiful, but only seemed to be, what would change? ~ The truth is a kudos, a token of our appreciation of its bravery, that we award a statement.What has the view sub specie aeternitatis to do with the moral efforts of the instant? By dwelling so on the remote prospects of the race are we not undermining our capacity to carry on? The perseveration, whether virtue or instinct, is worth cradling, isn’t it? The question is curious because it is not rhetorical; if asked, it is answered no. But nothing forces the curiosity; indeed, the din involved in giving point to living seeks to smother it. Even the perversity of the question can be turned to good use, can’t it? ~ Rereading the chapter13 from The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan nervelessly continues to lament the suffering of innocents...The children and the animals perhaps didn’t suffer: the girl of five, beaten into one large bruise, locked in a privy, excrement smeared over her face and stuffed into her mouth by her mother, all the while crying "dear kind God"; or the feeble little nag whipped on its "meek eyes" for not being up to its burden; or the boy of eight, shredded by hunting dogs in a display before his mother for having injured the retired general’s favorite dog’s paw with a thrown stone— perhaps none of these suffered in a sense appreciable by us. True suffering implies an awareness we exonerate these victims of in the same act of according them that innocence so endearing to us. We suffer more than they in contemplating what happens to them. This is how it is. Merely consider that it is not evil that cries for explanation, rather the awareness of evil in the notions of harmony, justice, kindness, a benevolent God, a perfectible species... The innocent, though our best victims, still do not suffer like we do. ~ "A cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."—Oscar Wilde Wilde, like many, confuses the cynic with the pessimist. Diogenes would have quoted you the price joyfully and marveled over how impossibly valuable nothing really is. ~ Not between a rock and a hard place, but between a rock and something that will turn the rock into powder.~ Ayer14, for instance, relieves the stressfrom the freedom/determinism impasse by showing us how freedom, as we commonly use the term, implies an absence of constraint, not a dearth of causation, a clear requirement for avoiding freedom’s devolution to sheer chance. The terms, ‘determinism’ and ‘causation’, are given a threatening cast by our fear of being forced, brought to heal by others or circumstances when all they suggest is that it is possible to provide an explanation in the light of past events for present or future events. His critical distinction—that cause is not constraint but an observable enabling regularity—intended to soothe our alarm and give the determinist her or his minimum, itself, however, too facilely assumes we will compromise with fate. All along we could have done that with less ceremony and stilled this inquietude and many others were we willing to live within the small boundaries of facts. It is hardly accidental that we allow the figurative grime on our terms the reign we do. What you so coolly, offhandedly, offer me as a facilitating circumstance I choose to view as blackmail because I want to read meaning in excess of what I would attribute to you if you were a stone. It is from a kind of love that I accuse you of the greatest crime in the world: impersonating a stone. But my hatred, too and not less, would honor you. Ayer surely jokes. ~ Eyeballs spooned out, impalings through body cavities, genital mutilations...A few of us engage in this sort of thing and worse; the rest delight (and not even secretly) in hearing about it, reading about it, expressing offense. This is supreme love. ~
Copyright © 1998 Bianco Luno and Victor Muñoz |
Part 3
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